 Ooh, that's bright. Wow. I haven't even done anything yet. Good Lordy. Good Lordy. I haven't shown anything yet. Hi, everyone. I'm Sean Kennedy. I'm a visual effects artist from Los Angeles. We're going to go along if this keeps up. I've been doing effects of some type or another for 20 years now, which is crazy. I've done three of these talks as well. Most of you probably know me already. If you don't by any chance, I did set up a like a little five minute resume just to show you like my background, where I came from and all that kind of stuff. So I moved out to Los Angeles in 97. I guess I have it here too. Yeah, moved out in 97. I did practical effects for five years, like things like miniature models and props and electronics. And then somewhere around 2002 or 2003, I switched over to digital effects. It took like a year to make that transition fully. Here's some stuff I've worked on, like practical models. I got my first screen credit on this movie, Ground Control with Keep for Sutherland. I think it was just straight to video. But there's like an airplane worked on. We used to make things for game shows like Wheel of Fortune and stuff like that. They would have Movie Week and they need like a 30 foot popcorn or something. I think that was like Cruise Week or something. Was this working? Yeah, there we go. And this is just a personal project, animatronics, that kind of stuff. This was for a movie called Blood Surf, Giant Animatronics. It's all hydraulic and all that. I got to do some makeup effects, which comes with a lot of fake blood. So sometimes you get to have a lot of fun like that, fake arm getting ripped off and all that. Every once in a while you get to be in a movie, which is ridiculous. If you're standing around on set and an actor didn't show up or they just need more people, you get to be in something. So here I am as an evil guard. I strongly advise you never watch this movie. So after doing a few years in these smaller companies, I got to work at some big companies. The first one was called Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated. I started there in 2000. I got to work on things like the Spider-Man movies and Aliens vs. Predator. I think they won an Oscar for Death Becomes Her, I think, so they have an Oscar for doing makeup effects. And also shortly after that, I got to work for Rick Baker, who's a really famous creature designer, who I believe has the most Oscars of any living person, I think. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's somewhere up there. And I got to work on Men in Black 2 and Curse at his studio. This is some scenes from that kind of stuff. That's Jake Gyllenhaal in the Bubble Boy suit to help build these bubbles. You can see me holding the arm out. And that's Aliens vs. Predator, which was the last creature effects movie I worked on, working on an alien foot there. Spider-Man movies, the first two with Toby McGuire. We built the suits. I had to cut out all the webs that go on it. Somebody else, another company, made the actual costume itself. This was an early one before they got the printing done on it. We were doing tests and all that. So that was a lot of fun doing a couple of those. And then around 2002, like I said, I started switching over to digital effects. These are some of the companies I've worked at. And the first one was a small company called Pacific Vision Productions, where we did these kinds of movies, comedies. My very first one was Austin Powers' Gold Member. We worked on a lot of... We worked on... We did a lot of invisible effects. We did a lot of Ben Stiller movies and Will Ferrell movies and Mike Myers movies. Lots of fixing things, changing things. Things that, you know, they tell you you're not supposed to talk about. Don't tell anybody this was a digital effect, all that kind of stuff. But it was really fun, got to learn a lot, got to do a little bit of 3D. And again, every once in a while, you get to be in a movie again. There was nobody here when they shot this. This is Man's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. And we had to populate it with people. So we just shot ourselves on the blue screen. And back, we took changes of clothes, shot ourselves a bunch of times, calmed ourselves in. So there's me right there. I'm actually in there a few other times, but that's the easiest one to find. After a few years at Pacific Vision... Lord. After a few years at that company, I got a chance to work at a company called Cafe Effects on this movie. And it was a lot of fun, but they were in a different city. So I was living out of a hotel for three or four months while I did this. And when it was over, they asked me to stay and I had to play Lee Decline just because I wanted to go back to L.A. and back to my own apartment. But this was really fun to work on. And after that, worked at Rhythm & Hughes, big company, lots of Academy Awards, all that kind of stuff. I worked on Garfield too. So they kind of start you on the cartoony things and move you up to the bigger things, but obviously you got to work on a lot of great, great projects. And this is actually when I started using Blender as well. And where I first met Tawn came to Rhythm & Hughes during Big Buck Bunny. But I used Blender on things like Big Miracle and Yogi Bear and Percy Jackson and very little bit on Life of Pi and a few other things there. A few other. This is the crew at Rhythm & Hughes right before the whole bankruptcy thing went on if you know anything about that. Lots of people there. I'm really easy to see. I'm actually right there with the yellow shirt. I wore yellow because I knew it was a big company and I knew I'd never fight my way to the front and all that. So if I wore yellow, I'd always be able to find me so I wore yellow. Working at a company like that, you get to win the awards once in a while because everybody there is just amazing artists. So we won two Oscars while I was there. And both were supervised by Bill Westenhofer, this guy on the screen left of me. He's a great guy, really nice guy and has more recently worked on things like Wonder Woman and World of Warcraft where he actually used Blender himself to put a character in. So yeah, really nice guy and still doing amazing stuff. So then I did freelance after Rhythm & Hughes went under. I did freelance. This slides up, I got the thinking like, where does that word even come from? This is where it comes from. I had no idea. It's from this book Ivan Ho from 1819 that I offered Richard the service of my freelances. He refused them thanks to the bustling times. Man of Action will always find employment. Oh, more in the middle. So yeah, I always it's encouraging to think of us always like knights who don't have a king to employ us and we're out there just looking for work. So these are some of the freelance things I worked on. I was freelance at home for like two and a half years. I spent most of that time working on this movie First Contact, which is an alien movie. And I used Blender on like 60 to 70% of it. All the 3D, a lot of the compositing, keying, all that kind of stuff. A lot of these other things were short films, feature independent films. That was a TV movie. That was a Disney television series that a friend of mine was a supervisor on. So I got to work on that a lot. Used a bit of Blender on that. Yeah, and then so you think you can dance, we'll get to in a little bit, but a lot of that kind of stuff. So for the past two and a half years I've been working at another studio called COSA Visual Effects where we do mostly TV stuff except for Pirates of the Caribbean the last one there, we did some stuff on that, but they generally don't like to work on features. They really like TV stuff. So it's been fun. We've gotten some good projects obviously. There's actually a lot more that we've worked on. I picked out things specifically that I've used Blender a lot on. So I've used Blender on all these things. They really love that I use Blender. And this is the crew at COSA. And if you think I'm easy to find with the yellow shirt, you're wrong. That's my friend Comma. I'm over there. So it was much there's a much smaller company. I didn't I thought smaller would be easier to find me. I didn't have to do anything to stand out really. So and again with you surround yourself with amazing artists. I tend to win things. So this year at the Emmys, which is kind of like the Academy Awards for TV, we won both. There's only two categories for visual effects. There's outstanding and outstanding supporting. And we won both. We won for Westworld as part of like an ensemble, which is like five or six other companies also won with us. And then Gotham was all us. Everybody up there is a COSA employee. And I used Blender on both. So good stuff. So yeah, I still get some work. I got a lot to go through. So we got to go. We got to go fast. Leave the weapon. TV show based on the old the movie series. They bring it back. It's on season two now, I believe. This was a screenshot of just the smokes in my day. There was a fireworks warehouse that they have a gun fight in. So of course the fireworks are going to go off. Usually we use like smoke elements. You know, we have like a library of practical elements, but this was a very specific kind of they wanted it to come out and then kind of billow in the area in front. So I ran a quick sim. I do this. This is what I use Blender for mostly actually at work is I feel like every week I'm running at least like two smoke sims. Next up is this shot. There it goes. It's kind of stuttery, but this was also for lethal weapon. There's a piston you can see where the gas tank is supposed to be. They needed that removed. They had mentioned to me to maybe just clone some of the rest of the undercarriage over it, but I thought there's a gas tank supposed to be there while I just make the gas tank. So I made a gas tank, tracked it in. I use like Luma matting to pull some of that practical fire back over top. I put some practical fire in the actual hole of the you can see the model here. And then I did a smoke sim to kind of even help blend it in a bit and tried to pull some of that plate smoke back over top as well. So that was fun. So then there was this shot, which was this was a big one. This is this one actually brought Blender to the attention of everybody at my work, even though I'd been using it for a while before that. But so this shot was you can see in this first one, the window there's some plexiglass over it. This is the first episode of the show, the pilot episode. And at the end of it, there's this big car chase, the bad guys in this car and the windows down and during the car chase, you know, he's exchanging evil looks with the heroes and stuff. So you see the actor, you see the windows down and then at the end of the car chase, he wrecks and they had this plexiglass over because they had a stunt driver in there. They wanted to be safe. So they had the plexiglass with the big double sided tape and all that. So those last few shots, they wanted me to to reduce the reflection. You can see there's like really bad reflections on it. And they needed that reduced and they didn't bid for 3D on it. They only bid for 2D. So they were telling me like maybe just rotoscope it and darken it. So I did that on a few of the shots and it worked pretty good because they were only like nine or ten frames really short and motion blurred. They just whipped by. But the last one, this one here is slow motion. The car is crashing and bending and you're looking right at that window the whole time. Here's a breakdown of it actually. Oh, next up actually. This is, I ended up, here's what I ended up doing. I went on blend swap. I grabbed the model of the Mustang. I grabbed a low poly rigged human being. I took, earlier in the scene, there's shots of that actor that's driving that car. I took a few screen shots of that. Kind of photoshopped his face over the map that the low poly guy came with. Put him in there. Just animated him really basic. I'm not a character animator at all. And when I track this in, you can see it's not very lined up. Like the grills are off and stuff. I was only paying attention to the window because that's all I needed was just to see in that window. And hopefully this will play too. Maybe once it gets going. But I removed some cameras as well. When they do explosions and car wrecks, they shoot it from all kinds of angles. So I didn't get rid of some cameras. But you can see how bad that reflection is. And that color correcting just wasn't going to make it go away. So did a quick quick hand track. The car is all bending. So I wasn't even sure if if an object track was going to work. So I didn't even bother wasting time. I think I did this in like three hours, something like that. It was moving pretty quick. But yeah, the end shot looked pretty good. You can see in there, it looks like the actor a little bit. I think he even put a displace on him. I think the actor was a bit chunkier so I kind of puffed him up a little. But it worked great. And I just wanted to thank too the the people on BlendSwap that made the assets. You're supposed to give them credit and I don't even get credit on these TV shows. So I can't ever thank them. So I thought I'd take a second and thank them. I'm not even going to try and pronounce those but thank you guys very much. The assets were wonderful. Another series was Pitch. It only lasted one season but it was about the first female in Major League Baseball in America. And here's a shot I did. You can see the reflection of that camera in the side of the car. You can see the crane. It was over his face when the window was up. It's over both of these windows. There's a crew member walking around. This is one of the hardest removals I've ever done in my career. I used every trick I know including Blender which you can see here. There's like a I made a real simple wire frame model the side of the car just from a plane. I used a match move from our match move department which we have at work and once I threw a HDR in there I think I might have messed around with the HDR to get palm trees where I needed them and stuff like that but it reflected perfectly. It's just a really basic glossy black and now I had this kind of clean plate. I did different ones for the windows as well as the side and then I had this great clean plate that I could use to patch in wherever I needed. I still had to use a million other tricks especially over his face over the window and all that but it worked great. It worked really good. It turned out well. And everybody you can see I also got a crowd in there cheering across the street and a TV truck and stuff and everybody at work was floored that come and ask I don't know what in the world did you do all that but here you can see the model just really basic nothing fancy at all texture also basic a lot of people when they do car materials they like to do those double layers of clear coat and all that and this is literally just a black glossy as simple as it gets it's nothing fancy. Another shot is this shot I called it at work we called it the Scroogey shot because she's the type of pitch that she's throwing they wanted to make this big deal so as soon as she lets go of the ball it becomes a CG ball and there was a lot of back and forth on this the CG part itself was generally pretty straight forward and easy but there was a lot of back and forth with how the ball was moving because it was this specific pitch they kept sending back notes no needs to go more counterclockwise and slightly forward and back and forth so this one took a while and also in the background this is actually two plates two different shots that were then merged together for the background and there was nobody in the crowd at all so that was all filled in I think there might have been like 5 or 10 people behind home plate so a lot of work but the ball is all blender Star which is another series that's out now it's done by this guy named Lee Daniels who does a show called Empire which is really popular and this is his other show and it's about three young ladies trying to make it in music and all that and there's these sequences they wanted in the first season where they go into her fantasy world about what the band is going to be like when they make it and he described it as like the frame tearing as if a pencil was like being poked out of her forehead and then it was peeling back and our 3D department at the time was swamped with other things so they came to me and said can blender do that stuff and I said I have no idea but we'll find out so on blender market there used to be this tool called cloth effects it's not there anymore I don't know why it's a magnificent tool but I grabbed it I think it was like 30 bucks or 35 bucks I learned it in like half an hour I was able to crank this out in the morning and they loved it it was exactly what they wanted you can see the shape that I made to really kind of art direct the tears I had to like design this I was like moving lumps around on this to get certain parts to tear at certain times so that was the trickiest thing about this and another funny thing about this one was the underside of this tear when I originally did the first test I had the samples really low because we just needed to get it cranked out to get approval so it was really low samples it was very fireflies chattering everywhere and when I defocus that in compositing it became this real nice bokeh effect and it looked like glitter it looked really nice and we sent that off to them and apparently they liked it but didn't tell us anything about it they just liked it so later on when I did the final version and I turned up the samples and it smoothed it out and all that went away they asked for it back so I had to turn the samples way back down and re-render again and then they loved it so that was an interesting request Westworld another popular show did a lot of stuff on this used blender just for a couple blood things actually so this is kind of graphic I don't know I mean we've already seen some fake blood maybe it's no big deal but if gunshots bother you you may want to not watch for just a minute but obviously these people are getting killed badly shot gun blasts close range and then some of this was practical this is the final scene what it looked like I believe this was episode 2 I think and here's what the plate that they shot looked like like all cut together so you can see there was a little bit that guy had practical blood and he's got some stuff on his face but when doing that shotgun blasts I used a lot of practical elements like real they want gory stringy things so I used a lot of practical elements but they also wanted a forceful like blast so here you can see hopefully you can see that maybe it's too dark but there's a blast of particles which I have some screenshots of it and then I did this as well for under this guy's neck just some really simple sim I just put another object in there to kind of break it up make it look a bit more real but for that for the blast coming out of this guy I ended up using a technique that Jonathan Lampel has done a tutorial on where he has a train and there's smoke coming out of it and I saw that and I saved it because I thought this is so useful for so many things and I ended up just making the smoke red and it looked like blood and it gave a real nice it's like a gory chunky kind of looks like a spray it's not even and that's what I liked about it so really useful technique another show is Orville we work on Seth McFarland doing like a space Star Trek type show one of the shots I worked on was the for the title sequence so every if you've ever watched the show there's like an actor's name over this shot and they play it on every episode which is kind of nice this is all matte painting except for the ship and the asteroids the asteroids go all the way back that blue thing the blue trail I don't know if it's that noticeable but the the ship was given to me by our 3D department everything else is a matte painting and then the asteroids are all blender and here you can see what that looked like I originally tried to do it all in one big particle system all the way back to kind of the infinity and wasn't really working couldn't control things you know they'd send a note like can we just get the foreground one spinning a little faster and then it wrecks everything so I ended up breaking it up into like four or five different particle systems I did some stuff on the planet in the background the bigger chunks were matte painting things that I just kind of spline warped and moved around and then I made a dust element with blender and I made some sparkly elements as well which I think I've got a video right to play yeah here you can see them kind of moving which is what they look like the sparkly elements just kind of gave you know life to that planet in the background and it's like the last clip here after these ones yeah it was really fun doing all this like kind of bringing this matte painting to life just with every particle thing I could think of for it's fun another show is the gifted which I couldn't get any videos cleared for because it's it's on the air right now it's there about halfway through the first season I think but I found this online so I'm assuming I can use it this is a character named eclipse and his power is beams coming out of his hands and I in the first episode all those beams which he uses a lot were done in blender I did particle systems that I then handed off to compositors I would render out I had a really complex little rig set up of fingertips that all came together in one other emitter that then emitted wherever I wanted it to go and I rendered them out as like red green and blue particles just primary colors with no shading and the compositors was used like the red past create the initial glow and then the green past to cut it out and make it look a bit more hectic and busy and I did like some concussion blast passes and stuff all kinds of different passes that the compositors used to put it together it was interesting because I work there as a compositor I was hired as a compositor and I spent the entire pilot season working on this as a 3D artist doing particles so that was kind of fun which brings me to this one so you think you can dance popular show this was a freelance thing I did on my own I had a friend contact me and say that he had some friend he had a friend of a friend that was going to be doing some green screen stuff and they needed a warehouse environment and I said I can do that I do green screens every day and warehouse that's not a super complex environment I'm sure I can handle that and when I went to set that day I found out it was so you think you can dance and I did a new opening for the 14th season of the show so I asked the producer why I was there like I need to talk to your motion graphics guy I know you guys will have a lot of motion graphics in this and I'll need to work hand in hand with that person whoever it is and they said we don't really have one so do you know anybody and I'm like I guess so alright so my original intent was to do everything myself tracking and just whatever they needed and then hand it off to whoever their motion graphics person was I ended up being that now I was like the supervisor of this entire thing so I instantly called people I called a match mover from work I called a roto scoop guy a graphics guy and I even called a supervisor friend of mine to kind of help me supervise I was going to be out of town for a bit just to help with some of the compositing as well and here you can see this is the rough edit that they gave us to bid on it's only 30 seconds but it's a lot of shots I think it ended up being maybe 30 shots and these transitions they're doing their idea was to once we had a 3D camera and a 3D environment to have the camera kind of whipping to other parts of the warehouse and then you'd see more of the dancers and I wasn't sure it was a three week deadline to do all this so it was a little tight and I wasn't sure if that was going to happen or not so yeah that was the that was the edit that's all it was so it started with research went online look for wall warehouses look for a bunch of them and these are the four that they like the most especially these bottom two they really like the graffiti and the brick and the kind of the messiness of them so that's kind of the direction we were heading with it I also looked at all their previous openings they liked primary colors and bursts of light and flashes and things all that kind of stuff so I figured we'd be doing a lot of that which isn't bad it's fine so I started modeling I got the rotoscope guy started I got the match mover started and and I started modeling and originally I started by just looking at the reference and saying oh that's a cool feature I'll just put that in so I'd build a wall and start putting in windows or put in a staircase but there was no real goal in mind I didn't have like a real destination so it was kind of frustrating so I worked on that for like a night or two and then I thought this isn't working so I took one of those images they liked and I just started photomodeling it thinking that this way I'll at least have a good starting point and then I can go in and kind of I can project the textures go in clean them up and make them look really nice and high res and then I can move the camera in there anywhere I want but I realized doing some lighting tests with this if you've ever tried to lighten interior in cycles it's tricky sometimes a lot of fireflies it takes a long time to get like a really nice clean beautiful render I know there's like the light portals and all that but even with those it was taking longer than I wanted especially because with a three week deadline we were going to be doing all our rendering the last week so it was going to be insane that last week was going to be nuts so I wanted things to render as fast as possible so also during this time they were asking to see stuff so I'm modeling for a week and they're already asking like we see something do you have anything to show us so I threw three planes together and a light and I did a really rough key and I sent this to them just to show that stuff was underway and that yes we did track a shot and things are going and that's it seemed to keep them slightly happy while I was doing other things so here's a slightly better one we put these sparks in the lights thinking that it'd be cool if every three or four shots maybe maybe as a transition the lights would spark like one would blow out and everything would cut to black that was just an early idea we didn't end up actually using it but we're going in that direction so when I set up that three wall two walls and a floor thing it rendered instantly it was almost like real time so that got me thinking back to my warehouse model why don't I just scrap that whole thing and only build what I need I thought why don't I just build up some walls and then I can just kind of piece it together whatever I need just bring in two walls bring the floor super quick so I started building walls I went to polygon which is Andrew Price's texture website which is amazing and I started grabbing textures and this is a really basic model but I spent a lot of time on the textures like layering things and painting my own dirt things and stuff and it ended up looking really good I did some pillars as well I did I think four different walls and I did three different pillars I did some here's another one it's more plaster and this like you can see this one's really white the previous one was kind of tan there was a brick colored one and it was really easy to shift the colors right like if I just shifted this more red it would go really good with the red brick wall and now it looks like a completely different environment so that's what I ended up doing is just building all these little pieces the kind of kit bash they call it kit bash everything together I built some steel girders as well kind of industrial looking and this is what a shot would end up looking like just super simple that second wall in fact is only there so you don't see through the doorway so really really simple rendered super fast I went to blend swap again and I grabbed like some warehouse things and I ended up I like these two roofs I ended up changing the textures a lot this was an early screenshot but I changed the textures a lot I changed the girders around to move the lights and stuff like that I got the light kit from blend swap as well I think the one in the center I kept the same but then I made it into all these I added a lens all that kind of stuff and then it started getting there it started looking like a like the lighting is not right here and there's the debris on the floor is kind of early but it was coming along and it looked like a warehouse and things were going right I think this is a video to show now it was almost like real time so I killed my my render time problem because this was instant you can see me like scaling things up and it's all just this cycle is amazing right it's incredible so it was wonderful and I think after this it'll show a full right move along move along there we go this is like a finished one and even that that's shaded and then it'll go to render it here and you can see it's still even with everything in there and the basic lighting it's still really fast and then for lighting all I really did was I used a spotlight where I looked where all the green screens were and I kind of positioned it so it matched up and then I would just throw a couple of point lights in the back just so it wouldn't go to total black and you could see a little bit back there but keep the focus really on the dancer so yeah that one started working out pretty good here you can see a shot I just brought in a pillar arrayed it all that and get a nice sense of depth going back especially as it goes dark it looks really good another one got graffiti in there now so things are coming along another one and so while all that was going on I had the motion graphics guy working on some stuff like we need some ideas for what kind of things to put in and we thought we had the idea of amplifying the dancers movements like drawing attention to what they were doing so we thought let's have some things like trailing off their limbs and this was the first thing we came up with was this like fire type this magical fire thing but they didn't like that at all so then we tried sparks just really basic thinking because we thought if we're going to have those lights blow out with sparks maybe this would tie it all together same kind of world thing and they didn't like that at all so then we tried the old light trails thing we were trying to think of other things and the graphics guy his name is John Fitzsimmons said why don't we just try that old light trails thing from like ten years ago it'll give them something else to look at another talking point and they loved it so we ended up going with the with the trails and we also tried practical effects as well just ideas that we were just thrown out to them to see if they like them like they didn't like the idea of the dancers kicking up dust but they did like the idea of dust in the environment as if there was been a smoke machine on set or something so we ended up going with that kind of thing and here's a bit more refined the keys better I've still got lights over the words and stuff but keys getting better lighting's coming in line a little bit and then this is a breakdown of a final shot this is one of the final shots and you can see the whole process what went into it all and for the final color there's another one of these crazy things like we would every time we would send them a test file we send them tons and tons of test files and we would send them here's a red one here's a green one because I was going with all those primary colors that they seem to like so we send them all they didn't really respond to anything like yeah it's okay but keep trying so we've tried more things and finally the graphics guy said let me just try the old Hollywood teal and orange thing and they loved it so teal and orange trails all the old tried and true things so yeah you can see all the all the passes that kind of went into it the rotoscoping stuff these are the elements the graphics guy made great stuff and then this is the entire final clip you can see all of it again it's only 30 seconds so should go pretty quick but yeah for those transitions as well we ended up we didn't have time to do these full on 3D camera moves so we ended up just hiding it with the light rigs so it worked out really well because they like things bright and flashy so it worked worked really well and you can see the graphics guy did these great things when their feet tapped the floor these great things come off so it's really fun yeah that's what we did for that it was really fun it was good it was hectic 3 weeks but we got it done it was really fun so I just want to end on my own site this is Open Visual Effects I started this about a year and a half ago and I'm just doing visual effects I'm just trying to show things like I'm trying to give back to the community a bit because obviously my software comes from the community and all the everything I've learned comes from the community and even in this talk I've mentioned a few times I've just found tutorials or assets on BlendSwap you know none of this would be possible without the community so I'm just trying to give back a little bit and kind of show that all the techniques that we're using on feature films and TV and all this stuff they're all perfectly possible in all this free software and not just Blender like anything open or free there's just some great stuff out there like working for two years at home I kind of needed to find all these pipeline tools things like frame sequence viewers I didn't want to open a compositing application every time I wanted to view a frame sequence render things like batch render managers and things like that there's a great program out now called Natron which is compositing it's a lot like Nuke so there's a lot of great tools out there I wanted to start this site just to kind of showcase that and show that everything that we're doing at high end places is also possible with free stuff so that's it feel free to swing by the site yeah there you go and I'm here all weekend so questions and all that feel free to come find me so there's a contact me page too if anybody it just emails me directly if everybody has questions or visual effects things they want to know about so